blurred prints - good on computer - Digital Darkroom Forum

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Q. blurred prints - good on computer
Asked by Tushit Jain (K=1697) on 1/21/2008

I recently had some digital photographs (JPEG 5M pixel taken in high quality setting on Digital Rebel) printed on ~4x7 inch size paper. The photographs looked sharp enough on a 17 inch LCD screen. However, the prints look much more blurred/soft. Could it be that the LCD gave a wrong sense of sharpness when the pictures were actually bad or did the printer do a bad job? Should I expect to get as sharp a photo as I see on the LCD? Essentially I want to take A4 size prints of the same photos and so should I expect to get sharper photos? Do I need to ask the shop to do something to increase sharpness of the prints?
I have uploaded 400K sized pics in my portfolio - Aspendos, lighthouse in Istanbul. They seem sharp enough to me...

Jan Hoffman (K=39467) - Comment Date 1/21/2008

I suspect the commercial printer had an equipment problem when they printed them. Did you try taking them to another photo lab?

Dave Arnold (K=55672) - Comment Date 1/21/2008

One big question, did you use unsharp mask on them before printing? I do on all my photos but only as I see them on screen. It was only recently that I learned that for prints, a much higher level of unsharp mask should be used than I was doing for the monitor.

I could dig the info up if interested in the actual numbers but basically, using settings of 200-300%, threshold of 1 to 2 and a radius of 0.4 to 1.0 is what I am now working with. I was using about 70%, radius of 2 to 4 and threshold of 0.

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